LEXSTATS: A program for the statistical analysis of word frequency distributions Harald Baayen University of Nijmegan Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics baayen@mpi.nl Fiona J. Tweedie Department of Statistics University of Glasgow fiona@stats.gla.ac.uk 1999 University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA ACH/ALLC 1999 editor encoder Sara A. Schmidt Various computationally intensive statistical models are available for the analysis of word frequency distributions (e.g., Carroll, 1967; Sichel 1975, and Chitashvili and Baayen, 1993). These models provide linguists and lexicographers with elegant means for obtaining sample-size invariant characteristic textual measures, for extrapolating the development of the vocabulary beyond sample sizes larger than the observed text size, and for estimating the population vocabulary size. Thusfar, these models have not been used widely, which is not surprising given the absence of software implementing these models. At the conference, we will present the beta version of LEXSTATS, a user-friendly GUI interface to a series of C programs that implement a wide range of word frequency analyses. LEXSTATS and the underlying C code will become available as freeware under the GNU software license. We will illustrate LEXSTATS by applying it to word frequency distributions of various kinds of texts as well as to word frequency distributions of a range of morphological categories. References J. B. Caroll On Sampling from a Lognormal Model of Word Frequency Distribution H. Kucera W. N. Francis Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English Providence Brown University Press 1967 406-424 R. J. Chitashvili R. H. Baayen Word Frequency Distributions G. Altmann L. Hreibicek Quantitative Text Analysis Trier Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 1993 54-135 H. S.Sichel On a Distibution Law for Word Frequencies Journal of the American Statistical Association 70 542-547 1975